I’m not in any way suggesting that Elixir can’t operate in this way. I’m merely suggesting that some of the obvious benefits of supervision models cease to be such obvious benefits. And without the obvious benefits, it becomes a much harder sell.
roblally
josevalim
Creator of Elixir
Let me ask one question then: how do you expect your app to behave when you drop connections to the database because there is a very quick netsplit of few seconds?
The supervisor model in Elixir was never about the fault tolerance at the load balancer or between nodes (it could be done like that but you would need to write a lot of infrastructure to get this working, i.e. it is not there out of the box). It is about bringing a reasonable model to reason about errors inside the programming language.
And the behaviour Elixir provides here can be achieved in all programming languages. I am pretty sure Java, Ruby, Python, Haskell, etc can all reconnect to the database when the database disconnects, the case for Elixir is that achieving the same behaviour is done more reliably and with simpler idioms.
So I agree with @keathley. Those two should not really be compared and if someone was expecting the value for Erlang/Elixir to come from the fault tolerance at such a high level, it is no surprise their expectations are not being met. But preferably those expectations should not have been set in the first place.
9
nsweeting
I would also argue that the fault-tolerant aspects of OTP are just one aspect of Elixir. There are PLENTY of other reasons that one can “sell” the language.
One of the greatest measures I place on a language is how easy it is to transition back into a codebase after not working with it for a while. We run a decent number of apps/microservices where I work - many of which arent touched for ages. It’s always a pleasure working with our Elixir apps. And we’re able to hit the ground running whenever changes are needed.
So while I came for all the other “obvious” benefits… I’ve really stayed for the above. And its why I chose it as our main tool going forward as well.
2
sasajuric
Author of Elixir In Action
No application can self-fix a bug, but it can mitigate problems and provide most of the service as possible, self-healing to resume the full service when the circumstances allow it. I’ve experienced many such situations in my Erlang/Elixir based production. We once had a case where some process in a critical service was failing constantly and frequently for two weeks, yet from the outside, from the standpoint of end-users, everything was working perfectly fine.
This is exactly how fault-tolerance in Erlang/Elixir works, but at a much more granular level. Instead of thinking about nodes, containers, or OS processes, we think in these lightweight processes, each of which corresponds to a single separate activity in a system.
Stopping a node, or an OS process might take down thousands, or even millions of activities. Stopping a single process will take down just one activity.
Because a single node/OS process might still handle a large number of system activities. I don’t want to take all of these down just because a minority of the activities in the single node are corrupted.
12
sorentwo
Oban Core Team
Intentionally ignoring all of the side discussions happening in here…
Elixir is my language of choice and certainly the community I enjoy participating in the most. About four years ago I introduced it at on a project at work and it has grown to be come our primary development language. In fact, it is a huge draw for hiring and something that we openly advertise with.
I (and the rest of the company) still use other languages on a daily basis (JS, Ruby, Python) and dabble with others (OCaml, Rust), but the BEAM is the gold standard.
6
sribe
Now that I’ve had a couple of apps in production for multiple years, I will say that I find this to be very true.
2
joaquinalcerro
First of all, let me say that I am new to developing and new to this forum which I joined since December 2016. But going back to the thread topic and taking into account that I have read the majority of its posts let me say that I am loving Elixir and the community.
Maybe because I am a new Developer and I don’t propose new libraries and I am mostly learning from all your guys I really don’t feel like this is a hostile community. I am pretty sure some experienced guys here laugh of my questions and opinions… like this one.
But… having said that let me say, from my point of view, what I think:
- I think some of you take comments personal and sometimes they are but generally they aren’t. There are a lot of intelligent and experienced people in this community and because of it, with strong opinions. Don’t ever take comments personally, try to extract the positive side of them.
- This is an open source community where you can say anything you want, being respectful of course.
- We are all entitled to explore different solutions to common problems but no one is obligated to accept your solutions. That is life, not the community. Accept the solution that best fits your needs.
- I agree, that for newcomers like me, we prefer libraries with strong adoption or at least I prefer. Constantly swapping libraries is a hassle considering that takes to much time to understand new paradigms considering that the documentation doesn’t really explain what problem is the library trying to solve. It explains how it works and the API but not the broader context.
- There is no way Elixir Language or this community is going to get it right with all of us. Some things are going to go the way we want and others won’t… that is life too.
- Elixir, Erlang and OTP is not a silver bullet to every use case, consider using the right tool for the job. People aren’t moving away from Elixir. Maybe, they found a better tool for the job… well at least I think of it that way.
Wrapping up, for me, Elixir is a great programming language and this is a great community and us having this discussion is part of it. I encourage everyone to keep the hard work and contributions it this community which I a pretty sure is one of the best.
Thanks to you all for your contributions and help.
Best regards,
17
jeramyRR
In the beginning it wasn’t hostile. Back in the days when we were all on IRC it was the best community I’d ever had a chance to be a part of. Then, the community moved here. Ever since then it does seem like the community has gotten more hostile. It’s hard to even put a finger on the exact thing that makes it feel that way, it just does.
1
wanton7
Then, the community moved here. Ever since then it does seem like the community has gotten more hostile.
Using chat compared to forum like this is really different way of communicating. In chat you usually write smaller post and can correct any miscommunication much faster.
It’s really easy to perceive someone’s bigger post as negative. Has happened to me so many times. Most of the time it seems people who perceived my posts as negative where native English speakers who “read between the lines”. Maybe it’s partly my Finnish nationality, because we don’t do small talk in this country.
So I think people reading these kind of bigger posts like in this forum should understand that people do communicate differently because of their backgrounds and English might not be their native language.
16
ardhitama
I’m not using elixir as my full time job, mostly I do go, ruby, and recently clojure. Leaving elixir for personal and freelancing projects. Does that making me as moved away from elixir?
I’m somewhat lucky to be part of a “decacorn” company, so I have experienced most arguments and worries about k8s at scale. My personal opinion is that k8s can be really useful in the context of beam as long as you put that beam app under container 
K8s currently is more advanced in term of “cloud” usability than OTP solution.
0